Pages

Sunday, October 11, 2015

American Placebo

While some people might define
the term Placebo Politics as an attempt to provide quick fixes to certain
serious political maladies, the way I use it when it comes to describing
Obama’s foreign policies is as a synonym for the politics of obfuscation: a
methodical endeavor to avoid having to review one’s policies and reassess one’s
worldview even as they clash with reality. We can also refer to this phenomenon
as the “Shirk ‘N’ Shift” – shirk the responsibility and shift the blame.
President Obama has become a master of this particular art, and his ability to
insert an opiate into the mix has been quite helpful as well.

What is that opiate? Security of
course.

Yes, President Obama himself admits
that the world is growing more and more turbulent and less and less safe for
others, but America is safe, he asserts, and our interests are protected. So it
seems that we are supposed at this stage to simply watch the ugliness unfolding
around us while wringing our hands and enjoying the relative safety we are
afforded, ignoring any potential long-term consequences as well as our sense of
humanity in the process. Hell, the Administration is not even developing any
plans for dealing with the humanitarian consequences of this policy!

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World